Improving Safety and Healthy Life of Elderly People: Italian and Japanese Experiences

The authors' project has been developing some watching over systems for elderly people living alone in rural areas. The watching over systems were developed and introduced in Kawai village, Shiwa town and Tono city in Iwate prefecture. In this time, we developed a new-type watching over system in order to reduce the initial cost and increase the operability. The feature of the system is to use usual telephone terminals and computer telephony technology. The experimental results, carried out in Iwate Prefecture and Aomori Prefecture in Japan, showed preferable operability. Based on the experimental results, this paper estimates the required number of telephone lines for number of users in the future.